These reports are due here by 10 December 2008 so that the Incubator PMC can relay them to the board.

Your project might need to report even if it is not listed below, please check your own reporting schedule or exceptions.

Please remember to include:

The "incubating since" info

The project's top 2 or 3 things to resolve prior to graduation

A short description of what your project's software does

BlueSky

BlueSky has been incubating since 01-12-2008. It is an e-learning solution designed to help solve the disparity in availability of qualified education between well-developed cities and poorer regions of China.

In the past month, we set up the website and applied for a new international ip address. Here is the website link: http://202.117.16.249. We've already put three version of source code, including complete version, clean version with project files (the project files are autogenerated by Anjuta, in case it may violate ASL, we divide the source code into two types, with or without project files) and purely clean version. We hope that someone could double check the legality of the clean source code so we can upload the source code soon.

Top priorities:

upload our source code to SVN repository. As soon as the code is granted by Apache community, this thing shoulde be finished quite soon.

IPMC comments:

jukka: Why the new server and web site? I don't seem to be able to access it (I'm in Switzerland).

clr: What does it mean "as soon as the code is granted by Apache community"?

Click

Click is a page and component oriented Java web framework.

Click has been incubating since July 2008.

Tasks completed since November:

SVN code base was succesfully migrated to ASF repository.

Click website was ported and is now hosted at the Incubator.

Top priorities:

Replace incompatible third party software which includes the JavaScript libraries JSCalendar and TinyMCE.

Cut the first official Apache release.

Import issues from existing JIRA.

Composer

Droids

Droids is a new Incubator project recently arrived from Apache Labs (end October). It's an intelligent standalone robot framework that allows one to create and extend existing web robots.

Things have been quiet this month in Droids. We focus on evolving the design and building a larger community.

Etch

Etch was accepted into Incubator on 2 September 2008.

Etch is a cross-platform, language- and transport-independent framework for building and consuming network services. The Etch toolset includes a network service description language, a compiler, and binding libraries for a variety of programming languages.

After the stumbling blocks reported last month, i.e. trouble to get going with infrastructure, the project is now up and running. All external code, documentation and Jira issues have been ported into the Apache Etch project. Development activity is medium (~30 commits in 2 weeks), from mainly two developers. The first posts to the etch-user list is promising, but development list is still a "Post Jira -> Fix It" without much mailing list discussion. This will be the main focal point to resolve over the next quarter.

The main splash page (http://incubator.apache.org/projects/etch.html) is still incomplete. The process to update the main page is burdensome. I've seen someone else suggest using an automated background process to incorporate changes and strongly support that idea.

The last remaining infrastructural issue is to find a home for our continuous build system. It requires a Windows home because of C# and microsoft visual studio components.

Hama

Hama has been incubating since 19 May, 2008. It is a parallel matrix computational package based on Hadoop Map/Reduce.

Development activity is medium from mainly two developer, we focus on proofing/benchmarking current code/algorithm recently. A number of inactive initial contributors stepped down from the project. And, 'Saumel Guo' joined to hama project as a new committer.

We are looking for more mathmathicians/committers

We will plan for our first release

Kato

Kato was accepted into the Incubator on 6 November 2008.

Kato is a project to develop the Specification, Reference Implementation, and TCK for JSR 326: the JVM Post-mortem Diagnostics API

Kato is just starting up; most of the infrastructure work has now been done; mailing lists, SVN, JIRA etc. created. Most initial committer user IDs have been requested, still waiting on the last couple of CLAs.

The next steps for Kato are agreeing the highest level user stories that will drive the JSR design and seeding the repository with the code contributed by IBM.

log4php

Olio

Olio has been incubating since September 2008.

Olio is a web 2.0 toolkit to help developers evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of various web technologies by implementing a reasonably complex application in several different technologies.

Two external users (i.e not belonging to the original committers' organizations) have started running Olio.

Olio Rails code has been committed to repository.

Several bugs have been filed and are being actively worked on.

OpenWebBeans

OpenWebBeans will be an ASL-licensed implementation of the Web Beans Specification which is defined as JSR-299.

OpenWebBeans entered the incubator in October 26, 2008. The following items have been made after the first report

The SVN, mailing lists and JIRA setup are done.

Project status page is completed and updated.

Project web site is created.

SVN directory structure is created.

Project code is dropped from the sourceforge to the SVN.

Project source code commit is started to add new functionalities to the implementation.

Project defects are written to the JIRA page.

We are working to get more attraction to the project. Belows are the task we will handle

We will try to finish the first alpha version.

We will create some documentation in the project web site.

We will looking for getting more committers.

RAT

RAT has struggled to gain any additional development community since joining the incubator. The small developer base means that releases are not really possible. Without releases, it's hard to find motivation for development of new functions for - what is - a mature code base. As a component of the Apache and Incubator release infrastructure, it made sense to bring RAT here. From the RAT project perspective, it made much less sense.

River

River is aimed at the development and advancement of the Jini technology core infrastructure. Jini technology is a service oriented architecture that defines a programming model which both exploits and extends Java technology to enable the construction of secure, distributed systems which are adaptive to change.

In November, Niclas Hedhman stepped up as a new Mentor for the project. He thinks River/Jini is too important to be ignored. This resulted in an extended discussion of what should actually happen with River. Quite a few voices have been heard, BUT most committers are quiet, which is worrying. The things that the vocal people can agree on are probably:

River needs new goals. The community is unable to define a single goal or agree on a couple of them.

People should not talk the talk, if they can't walk the walk. The infamous 'itch' is obviously not strong enough in any particular area, not enough low-hanging fruit so to speak. Niclas presented a simple solution; branch trunk and let those who are active to make the structural changes needed for a sustained future. Hopefully, those more experienced will also get excited and help out when they can.

Consolidation of external Jini projects. There are many external Jini projects. Some of those provide same or similar solutions. Many in the community think that these should merge, possibly under the River umbrella.

But there are many things where there are more opinions than there are people. Right now, we feel that is being a good thing, since it indicates a strong interest in the technology, and the challenge is to funnel this energy into something constructive, with or without the initial committers.

All in all, River project is slow, but we think we have a lot of willingness in the user community, and just need the lever to exploit this. The goal for now, up until the next report, is to get us going on Apache River "New Generation", where we indeed shake off the Sun heritage and start moving forward.

Incubating since December 2006

Shindig

Shindig is a reference implementation of the OpenSocial and gadgets stack, incubating since: 2007-12-06. The active community has built two parallel implementations of the OpenSocial and gadgets spec; one in Java and one in PHP. Currently the Shindig community is working toward an incubation release of the OpenSocial v0.8.1 spec as well as implementing the new functionality defined in OpenSocial v0.9.

Top 2 things to resolve prior to graduation:

Improve diversity of committers (progress, but on-going)

Run through at least one release (first release scheduled to go out by end of year)

Stonehenge

Stonehenge was just recently accepted into the Incubator. So far we have:

Set up the SVN, JIRA and Mailing lists

Added all the committers who have a CLA on file

Built a very basic website

Had a code donation from WSO2

We are awaiting more code donation

We still need to create our incubator status page and add to the list of incubator projects

Tashi

Tashi has been incubating since September 2008.

The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for cloud computing on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call Big Data). The idea is to build a cluster management system that enables the Big Data that are stored in a cluster/data center to be accessed, shared, manipulated, and computed on by remote users in a convenient, efficient, and safe manner.

Work has been progressing toward an initial test installation of Tashi via the OpenCirrus testbed (http://www.opencirrus.org/). This has consumed much of the developers' time. During this though, a few minor changes were made to the code to make it more amenable to deployment.

Items to be resolved before graduation:

Check and make sure that the files that have been donated have been updated to reflect the new ASF copyright

Check and make sure that all code included with the distribution is covered by one or more of the approved licenses

Migrate the project to Apache infrastructure (begin using Jira)

Community diversity (currently Intel and CMU committers)

Demonstrate ability to create Apache releases

VCL

VCL has been going through the startup phase of the project and the remainder of the new accounts were created over the last month. The codebase is in the process of being moved to the ASF. The developers at NC State were completing their work in progress for 2.0 and will transfer it shortly. Until then the project is flying a holding pattern.

In the interim we'll start some of the more mundane tasks like getting the web site setup and shtuffes like that.